Schumer: Illegal Immigrants Who Commit Identity Theft Should Still Be Granted Citizenship

They’ve broken the laws of a sovereign nation from day one in the U.S., but some illegal immigrants don’t stop there. The law-breaking sometimes continues in the form of forged documents and identity theft.

But hey, why should a pattern of criminality stop someone from being granted citizenship to the United States? At least that’s what Chuck Schumer (D-NY) believes.

CNS News has a great rundown of a Senate Judiciary Committee meeting last month, in which Chuck Grassley (R-IA) tells the story of a Houston area schoolteacher who had her identity stolen by an illegal. The identity theft ranged for a dozen years, and allowed the criminal to obtain a job, a mortgage, even medical care for their children – all in the schoolteachers name.

Grassley was offering an amendment to the immigration reform bill that would require registered provisional immigrant status be withheld until the illegal immigrant discloses all names and Social Security numbers they have used in the U.S.

Schumer thought this amendment was too extreme. Why? Because when you’ve forged documents and stolen account numbers, its really hard to keep track of them all.

“When people are living in undocumented status, there are times, I suppose, when they’ve made up identities, made up Social Security numbers,” Schumer told his Judiciary Committee colleagues. “How are they going to remember all that, and are we going to delay RPI status?

He went on…

“(The) purpose of this is to bring people out of the shadows,” Schumer said of the “reform” bill. “We all know when they lived in the shadows, they had to forge documents, forge Social Security numbers, et cetera. We want to stop that once and for all so it never happens again. But this isn’t going to help. This is going to leave millions of people still in the shadows and not able to come out of the shadows and won’t solve the problem that we’re trying to solve, which is to have as few people here illegally as possible, put them on RPI, provisional status and then get them on a path to citizenship.”

“I just don’t see how, when you’ve lived here 10 years, and you’ve had many different identities, many different numbers, you’re going to remember them all,” said Schumer.

About the AuthorRusty Weiss

Rusty Weiss is a freelance journalist focusing on the conservative movement and its political agenda. He has been writing conservatively charged articles for several years in the upstate New York area, and his writings have appeared in the Daily Caller, American Thinker, FoxNews.com, Big Government, the Times Union, and the Troy Record. He is also Editor of one of the top conservative blogs of 2012, the Mental Recession.